Burden of Dreams

Burden of Dreams gives us an extraordinary portrait of Herzog trapped in the middle of one of his wildest dreams. Read full review

Blank created an enduring record of hubris, exploitation and unrelenting misadventure in the pursuit of artistic greatness, all ideally symbolized in both films’ central image—fashioned from mud, sweat and timber—of a huge boat being hauled over a mountain. Read full review

Burden of Dreams would stand on its own as a "how-the-film- was-made" documentary and as an inquiry into the strange nature of film as the most collective of art forms. Fortunately for Blank and for us, the film that Herzog wound up finishing, Fitzcarraldo, is a triumph artistically as well as logistically. [15 Oct 1982, p.D1]

Herzog’s death-defying endeavor (executed with the help of an indigenous Indian tribe, not special effects) is the basis for Burden of Dreams, Les Blank’s lyric chronicle of the film’s four-year evolution. Read full review

Herzog’s singular vision and Blank’s brilliant capturing of that obsession seem especially worthy of consideration from the adventure film lovers who stay up late. Read full review

Just as Hearts Of Darkness is as compelling an adaptation of the Joseph Conrad novel as Apocalypse Now, Blank's Burden Of Dreams follows a maniacal Werner Herzog as he one-ups his blinkered hero in Fitzcarraldo, the tall-tale biography of a rubber magnate who builds an opera house in the middle of the Amazon jungle. Read full review

One of the most candid, most fascinating portraits ever made of a motion picture director at work. Read full review

More than just being about the making of FITZCARRALDO, the film is an incisive character study about a visionary filmmaker who seems to be oblivious to the fact that the making of his film is becoming as difficult and foolhardy as Fitzcarraldo's own struggles. Read full review

Films about film-making are usually deeply self-conscious, and sometimes deceiving. But there is one at least that succeeds in surpassing the movie whose making it describes. Read full review

The film is at once funny and, in its depiction of the scant differences between art and megalomania, somewhat frightening. Read full review

Burden of Dreams is most fascinating, however, when it zeroes in on Herzog himself. [28 Oct 1982, p.18]

The viewer finds himsel falternating between awe at the director's courage, energy and dedication, and horror at his monomania. [18 Oct 1982, p.95]

Blank's special brand of ethnographic film documentary finds a curiously appropriate subject in that weirdest of all capsule cultures: the on-location film crew. Read full review

It's obvious that Blank has been forced into many organizational shortcuts in an effort to stitch the random footage together. Read full review